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Apple's Trend Away From Tinkering
theodp writes "Having cut his programming teeth on an Apple ][e as a ten-year-old, Mark Pilgrim laments that Apple now seems to be doing everything in their power to stop his kids from finding the sense of wonder he did: 'Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of "jailbreaks" stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers. There won't ever be a MacsBug for the iPad. There won't be a ResEdit, or a Copy ][+ sector editor, or an iPad Peeks & Pokes Chart. And that's a real loss. Maybe not to you, but to somebody who doesn't even know it yet.'"
What makes computers great are their flexibility - it's an entire world to discover to someone young and new. Are we going to be in the insane situation where our children will need to dust off the old C64 from half a century ago just to learn the basics for themselves?
If all you've got is locked content on locked machines, you end up with mind firmly locked shut.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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But Mac OS X comes with development tools right on the install CD. How expensive (or difficult, back before bit torrent) it was to get a development environment up and running on Windows was what drove me to Linux and I'm pleased that Apple make it so easy to get programming tools on your Mac.
For a long time I was on the fence about Apple. I liked their strong sense of making sure everything works
But then I encountered their users, snobby idiots really. Although it was not because they used Apple, more that those with a specific profession tend to use Macs
Recently I havent liked Apple because of their DRM and crazy control they have over their products and markets. I mean IPods that you cant change the battery in? WTF!
Now yet another reason I dont like Apple, these guys dont seem to realize what they are doing, stagnating their own products by being jackasses about their products.
I have distantly wanted a Mac, just to toy with it... but why? No reason anymore.
I'm someone else who cut my teeth PEEKing and POKEing on Commodore and Sinclair machines. Hell, there were even magazines with "tricks-n-tips" for useful locations and what values would create what effects. Nowadays I suspect they'd just get sued under DMCA provisions for reverse engineering :-(
Yes, a sad time indeed.
It was nice to be able to tinker with early Apples because there were few alternatives. But as much as I enjoy a good rant against Apple, I fail to see the problem. Buy your kids something else. Either he thinks the latest Apple SHINY is more important than his child's opportunity to get under the hood or he doesn't, and there are (or soon will be) numerous alternatives that are not as tightly locked. Life is about decisions and trade-offs.
I think this is just a natural evolutionary process for most new technology. When personal computers were new, they were mainly purchased and used by hobbyists. Now they are mainstream and most people just want to use them to get things done, they don't care how or why they work. Cars were the same when they were first introduced. You had to know how to tinker just to keep them working. Now cars are everwhere and they are computerized and automated so much, it's hard to do the kind of tinkering that used to be common.
It's sad to see things change, but there will always be room for those who like to tinker. We still have Linux and *BSD, after all. I love my Mac, but sometimes it's nice to play around with Linux.
They just separate that audience and give them OS X. Let them play with the iPad through the SDK on it, instead of on the iPad itself.
iPads are meant for people that DON'T care about computers, but about real world activity.
It's something hackers could learn from Apple: how to make a massively technical device usable.
My kids use Linux. But sadly, even under Linux, there's no dead-easy kid-friendly way for them to learn programming the way I learned BASIC on my TRS-80 CoCo. I've introduced my one daughter to Tcl, but even that has advanced concepts compared to 1980s-era BASIC.
I've also ordered a 130-in-one electronics kit for my daughter because I remember how much fun I had with mine. Alas, Radio Shack no longer sells them... they've given up on tinkerers and hackers too.
Everybody knows that Apple computers are for creative people and that creative. You just have to think creatively. Think OUTSIDE the box. For example, I bought a PC.
That was the spirit Steve and Woz began with: empower the hacker.
Why is Woz not in charge of his own high-power company? The world is not fair, I suppose.
Woz was the tinkerer, who brought the spirit of the tinkerer to Apple. Steve Jobs is the anti-tinkerer; he just wants you to shut up and buy cool looking gadgets from him on a regular schedule.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I fail to see why a kid today can't learn programming on an Apple II or a C-64 or whatever simple computer form the 80s.
Reading the forums alot of the apple fans don't seem to like it. They can't figure out what to use it for or they don't like the restrictions. A lot of tablets are coming out this year that are more open.
Tens of millions of people play farmville or watch hulu and you can't do any of that on the ipad. You can only buy more content from apple. I'm wondering if apple did any market research before they crippled it.
While this is certainly true for the iPad, iPhone etc, it's really not true at all for OSX. OSX comes with a bunch of dev tools on the install disk, in a way that was not true way back when. Those kinds of utilities existed, but getting ahold of them was non-trivial for someone out in the boonies.
The iPad isn't a general purpose computer, although it seems like it's blurring the line a bit. Certainly no reason for doom and gloom.
I always find it a little sad when I read something like this, though. Part of the joy of those days was exploring something new and interesting, finding terra incognita... the problem is that your kids probably won't get that joy in exactly the same way, and very well may not be interested in those things at all... they are actual individuals with individual tastes and interests, not a bunch of little clones running around. It seems like every time someone goes to great lengths to recreate his precise childhood for his kids, it's just doomed to failure, just because they're kids. Unpredictable.
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
in machine language...
Few people want to play at that level any more and few need to. Most want to create really cool apps and for them access to the GUI is enough. Heck, C isn't taught in many schools any more.
But if a kid wants to play at low level, there are $25 or less offers on the web for the computers of yore. Or they can start reading code..it isn't like lots isn't available. And even for most OSS, the docs are so much more than the manufacturers manuals were in the 60s.
In the 50's and 60's hobby electronics was a huge thing - it was common to see people tinkering in their basements. It might still exist now in some manner, but it's far, far less popular and most people just want to come back from the store with an amplifier or radio that "just works".
It's the same with computers. We're going through the phase now where hobbyists are lamenting that they're being "locked out of their own computers", but no more than the electronic tinkerers are locked out of their consumer electronics unless they're very good with surface mount soldering and miniaturization.
The simple fact is that 98% of people out there just want their computer to work. They don't care about getting under the hood. If it plays their youtube videos, netflix streaming content, and lets them send some emails and play the latest game they bought from Steam or Best Buy, they're happy. That's all that's needed. So a company catering to that market instead of the 1 or 2 percent who want to tinker under the hood is just good business.
Yes, it means that the kind of computing we all grew up with in the 70's and 80's will either die or come close. But that's just the standard life cycle of technologies - it happened with radios just like it's happening now with computers. It's a mistake to extrapolate our interest to the general public, which doesn't share it. Since there are 50 or 100 of them for every one of us, they form a FAR larger market, and that is the direction things will inevitably shift over time. It's a lost cause trying to argue things like "but you're locked out of your own system!!". They don't *care* - that's not what they want out of a computer. The sooner computer nerds realize that, the easier it will be to adjust to the direction the market will be moving over time.
Apple isn't out to fight people that want to 'tinker', they are just going after a different market now, the 'consumer market'. Its where the real money is to be made, and the side effect are shiny closed boxes that 'just work'.
If you still want to 'tinker', you still can, just you do it elsewhere. Give your kid a FPGA board and some books on basic logic.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have a copy of the original "red book" with hand-written notes on shape tables, etc. I also had a plethora of other sources of information - the Wozpack, Disk Doctor, early copies of call-apple and coutless others which were hard to come-by in the UK at the time.
Kids of today, get off my lawn, etc.
So what we have now are "appliances" and lawyers.
And as they say; If you can't open it, you don't own it.
I understand not reading TFA, but at least read the fucking summary. One of his issues is "With every software update, the previous generation of "jailbreaks" stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own computers", and I must say, I agree.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
If all you've got is locked content on locked machines, you end up with mind firmly locked shut.
Bollocks. Bullshit. Hyperbole.
I.T.'s loss is the rest of the world's gain. The less time people spend fucking around with irrelevant I.T. wheels the more time spent on the real problems and solutions of the world.
Deleted
Even Linus readily acknowledges that the world needs more than the Linux model, that the Windows and OS X can all co-exist.
And I hear people talking all the time that OS X is a joy to program for, and not particularly hard.
The iPod/iPhone/iPad is in the form factor that's best suited to appliance. That is, most (90+%) just want them to work. Where even the most polished desktop is too complicated for their tastes and task at hand. Shouldn't their demands be met? BTW, I'm not covering for DRM or the like which only serves the content provider -- just that the appliance view of things is really useful to some people.
Do we complain how the Kindle or past Nokia phones are essentially closed to the average person the same way? Why is this reserved for Apple?
Really. I taught my 45 y/o uncle how to use a computer (Windows 7), his experience to computers limited previously to ATMs. It was painful. There is so much to learn that us geeks take for granted. The computer's behavior is so seemingly arbitrary at times, as are the solutions sometimes. These people don't want a "sense of wonder", they found it in other areas already and they want to have something easy to learn and use - should they be denied entrance into the digital world because they're not geeky enough? Geez, I'm glad when I don't have to fuck around with yet another relatives beige box for once.
I hope that the open PC never goes away. But there should be room for other solutions without the endless complaining. (And yes, the steps Apple does to clamp down their devices from the users themselves, who want to explore and not through misuse, absolutely sucks and should be called on it every step of the way).
The Apple II was a computer. You cans till tinker with Apple computer.
Apple also sells Appliances. More difficult to tinker with, just like your TV.
You want a computer for tinkers? the Macs work great. OSX on BSD.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't really see the iPad as a "personal computer", but an appliance, a bit like a washing machine or a microwave oven (although that may be pushing it because the iPad does a bit more than "just wash clothes" or just "toast" or whatever). But it's clearly pitched as a consumer appliance, rather than a general purpose computer.
And no, I won't be getting one.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The APPLE ][ was much more a tinkerers machine than the PET or the TRS 80. Having 7 slots for expansion cards was a lot in those days - a cool apple was one with an after market perspex lid so you could see the cool expansion cards. No ofense this is not a insightfull comment just lame
The iP* products are consumer electronic devices, not general purpose machines. It makes perfect sense that these are locked down for the sake of reliability and performance. Not to mention the Apple business model is based on the closed nature of these products.
The desktop versions of OS X are incredibly flexible and powerful tools, with the usability bonus of a well thought out graphical shell. There is a reason programmers and IT people are migrating en mass to Mac--they are way ahead of the competition when it comes to power and flexibility compared to Windows, and reliability and usability for an end user compared to Linux.
When you purchase a Mac, you are getting a full featured development environment and sys admin toolkit out of the box.
Pay $100 for a developer's license and you can do whatever you want to you iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad.
XCode and Applescript come with every "real" Mac for no additional charge.
What is the problem here? That you can't program the iPad on the iPad? Sorry, but that is hardy worth the energy of his rant.
Yes, I read the article. Well, I tried. It's a poorly written, confusing rant.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
What we should be doing is trying to get the DMCA overturned; It is the bane of the tinker. It's ironic because I'm guessing many of the people working on this stuff over at Apple got interested in computers because of the creativity they could express by hacking away at computers.
I should say though, that Apple is not the only company in town creating hardware, I mean honestly a lot of these articles seem to make some leap at some point about how Apple is representative of all hardware manufacturers, when I think that's just not true. They create some stylish products, people buy them, and then they miss out on hacking the hardware. If people really want the option to hack the hardware, don't buy this locked down crap. It's not like Apple is the only game in town, they live off this spotlight everyone creates for them. Just get that less stylish piece of hardware that offers tons of customization and hopefully at some point Apple will have to learn what they should be doing.
Meet new people, and kill them.
Frickin' Macs with Frickin' laser beams on em... that would solve the problem.
ResEdit was always my argument in Mac vs. PC arguments! (This was back in the good old System 7 days.) My PC friends could bring up right-clicking, software availability, etc., etc. all day. Then I would show them some of the stuff I'd done with ResEdit (e.g., remake Oregon Trail into a parody version of itself), and I would win the argument hands down. (OK, maybe you could do the same stuff on a PC, but none of us knew how.) These days, I'm a Linux guy, but it's sad to me that Macs are getting more locked up all the time. I guess someone has to satisfy the demands of the just-do-it-for-me consumers, but I'm sad that it turned out to be Apple.
The Apple ][ came with manuals that had the ROM listings. The ][+ (at least) had a mini-assembler built right in (Sweet-16, baby!). It had full schematics right there in the box. The default "shell" was a BASIC interpreter, fer cryin' out loud!
The Apple ][ was most definitely a tinkerer's machine.
There's a huge difference between the Apple ][ and pretty much any mainstream computer available today. The Apple ][ (and to a certain extent, the Commodore 64) was simple. Almost everything you did was related to the hardware. If you wanted to do anything but launch programs, you pretty much had to learn something about the computer, and how computers operate in general. Anyone nostalgic for those days is nuts.
Don't get me wrong. I really loved the Apple ][. (This was before the ][+ or ][e, you puppies.) I believe I am a much stronger computer geek because of it. I'd wager those who learned computing on the Apple ][ make up a good percentage of the alpha geeks today.
Computers today are far cooler than they were back then. Part of the reason is, they no longer resemble "computers" so much as they are now communications devices, or information handling devices. The downside is that kids starting out these days aren't learning about the true fundamentals of how computers work. Also, they're shielded from even the ability to tinker with them.
That's not as much of a loss as you might suppose. It's not like it'd be the old Apple ][ experience anyway.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I dunno, I usually find that the people "not willing to learn the in's and out's" are the same people who aren't willing to consider Mac as an option. They want to eat their cake and have it too: they don't want a machine that is considered "easy to use" as an affront to their egos, but they don't want to spend any effort learning either.
There is also the money thing, but often as not I'll see them drop more bucks on a noisy beige box with too-small screen than they would have spent on the "low end" apple. And although there is much more variety of PC equipment, they will inexplicably end up with slower specs than the low end apple.
Of course it's not helped that the stores put the ram capacity on the sticker, but the ram speed is unmentioned. Or the raw clock rate of the cpu, but not the size of the last level cache.
Anyway, my answer is usually "get the one that feels right for you" and if pressed, tell them I have a apple because of the unix (and milled aluminum case, which although fashionable, is also comfortably rigid giving it a "not a toy" feel.). Also file vault, which windows still offers no equivalent to unless you buy the ultimate extreem mega costly edition.
If they're willing to learn the ins and outs, mac actually has a lot to offer. But if they need excel macros, Windows is the only choice: office mac doesn't have 'em. (or doesn't have vbscript or something. It's not the complete ms office product) and mac's office suite doesn't understand 'em.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
In their defense, personal computer programming is much more complicated than it was in 1982. The machines and the hardware is several orders of magnitude faster and denser than it was then. The basics do change.
Don't forget that the primary reason for the existence of Apple Inc is to facilitate the orderly and systematic transfer of money from the bank accounts of bored yuppies to the account of Steven Jobs. The toys and the technology is a means to an end. Home computers started in the 1970s as toys for hackers, became business office tools in the 1980s, design and educational tools in the 1990s, and home-entertainment/communications centers in the 2000s. (..and destroying the previous industry giants in each field in the process)
People wishing to provide for their kids the experiences that they had programming 8-bit home computers should get into Aurdino and other small-scale microcontroller-based systems. The chips are cheap. The programmers are low-cost. The assemblers and compilers are free and open-sourced. Sensors are cheap, as are LCD-character displays. Graphics LCD modules are getting cheaper, but are a long way from being cheap. Gigabyte storage of data is dirt-cheap as SD cards, but they can have a difficult learning curve. In this field, projects are often shared. Tinkering and development is encouraged. Questions, even beginning questions, get answered.
When PCs and Macs get locked down in place, the microcontroller communities sprout up like mushrooms. This is the place for tinkerers. But, please, don't let the people at Microsoft and Apple know!
Now, Apple appears to be more ideologically aligned with the "Big Brother" than the hammer thrower. While it's not quite gotten to the "Information Purification Directives" level yet ...
When Apple issues an update that turns a feature off, they've issued an "information purification directive.
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. - Orwell
Every generation seems to have its own style of tinkering.
Broadly speaking, fifty years ago it was ham radio, thirty years ago it was microcomputers like the Apple, Commodore and Atari, today I think it's microcontrollers like the PIC, AVR or especially the Arduino. (Yeah, I know, there's a lot of hobbies and tinkering I glossed over like chemistry, cars, etc, etc. I sure someone will make a list of everything I missed.)
But my point is, today most tinkering seems to be centered around using microcontrollers in various applications. I think the Arduino has accelerated the trend because of its ease of use. In addition, RF modules like the XBee have made it almost ridiculously easy to create distributed networks of microcomputers for whatever application you can think of.
Because of the proliferation of powerful microcontrollers and RF modules, my predication is that 30 years from now people look back at this as the time hobbiest robotics really took off. (Yeah, I know, people have been doing hobbiest robots for years, I just think that the combination of cheap, powerful computers, microcontrollers, motor controllers, RF modules and GPS modules will accelerate the trend.)
Now it seems more focus is on disabling DRM, finding vulnerabilities, and exploits. It used to be about extending functionality or modifying devices. Get with the times Apple is just presenting a bigger challange.
Apple's trend away from tinkering predates the company. During the design and building phase of the ][, Woz was building in things which Jobs didn't want. Three specifically that they argued over were color (vs. black and white output), the lid (and by extension, poking around inside) and memory expansion past the max installed 16 K (this is the actual source of the often repeated and rarely correct "Who would ever need more than X-kb of memory?" -- It was Jobs and it was 16K). The second and third are both in the 'tinkering' group of features. In all cases Woz won, and we got a machine that ultimately was pushed to do things which by design it supposedly 'couldn't'.
When Jobs decided to make his own machine, all three of the above limitations were built in. The first Mac was B&W, had no lid, and came with the only memory configuration that it could run. At the time I was senior/technical editor of The Road Apple, a 'zine for Apple ][, // and ]|[ users, created with the specific intention of trying to prevent Apple from dropping the ][ line. (As far as I have ever been able to determine, it was the first computer publication produced simultaneously in the US (Portland OR; Al Martin, Publisher)
and USSR (Moscow, Russia); my co-editor was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Academician Vladimir Fedorov). When Woz left, Jobs prevailed and we lost. Jobs' design choices for the first Mac and his acquiring complete control when Woz left, were the second and third major changes away from tinkering. Both were a direct result of Job's taking back those things he wanted done on the ][ that allowed tinkering (or were just plain neat hacks) but which Woz chose to do his own way. Simply put, this direction was based on the fact that Jobs lost those arguments. resented it, and when he got the chance, he finally got his own way.
References for the historical stuff can all be located if one digs. Support for Jobs' tendency towards management techniques such as tantrums and verbiage bordering on abuse has also been documented up through the point where John Scully took over for 10 years so Jobs could grow up and gain some people skills. Collections of The Road Apple were available on some of the Apple ][ ftp sites. One that has been converted to webby stuff is at http://apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/GS.WorldView/Resources/ROAD.APPLE/
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
'Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of "jailbreaks" stop working...
I can't see any reason for Apple to do things any other way. In some ways they're victims of their own success, just like Dell, HP, Microsoft and many other big companies. They've become so absorbed with their own chic they've lost sight of who helped get to where they are today. The artsy types have taken over from the tinkerers.
It's too bad their sense of style trumped everything else, because that used to be a nice bonus with Apple products, the "and they look cool" factor. Now style and marketing have edged out other factors. They're so absorbed protecting their market rice bowls they stopped caring about expanding it.
Tinkerers will always have a home with Linux.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I recently caught one colleague crying that the iPad is merely a digital consumption device. He pays more than $120 per month for cable TV. The irony.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
I'd love to see some development tools actually on the iPad. It appears that Apple has relaxed some of their rules with the announcement of the iPad so I wouldn't be surprised to see some user-programmable apps. I doubt you'll directly be able to create new apps die to security issues but maybe something like Scratch or maybe even Java or Python based programming. Also, there is nothing stopping anyone from creating a tool to develop web-based apps for the iPhone/iPad from the iPhone/iPad. You could do quite a lot with that given the capabilities of Safari.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The iphone and macbook freely allow tinkering, so I expect the iPod will be much the same.
If you recall all the peek charts did was give you access to system calls and variables, well... things are a little tighter now thanks to multitasking and you're expected to use an API to access them. Apart from that though, Apple is quite happy with you tinkering with your own computers to your heart's content.
What apple tries hard to control is you sharing those hacks with non tinkerers. Say I wrote an awesome iPad game and distributed the source code over the net for anyone with the SDK (a free download). Well, Apple would not exactly approve but they wouldn't stop me. However, say I distributed the same game in binary form, telling anybody interested to email me their IEMI number... well, I suspect Apple would take action at that point.
I had an Apple II. I didn't write any C code for it because I didn't have a C compiler, so instead I wrote assembly - in hindsight, how dumb is that! I mean, great, I can say I wrote 6502 assembly and sound geeky - but I'm sure I would've been more productive using C. Similarly, I had a Mac Plus and I had to copy someone else's compiler to be able to write software. Piracy because I wanted to write software... Then I got a 6100, and I shelled out I believe $150 of my hard earned student money to buy a compiler (Metrowerks). I couldn't afford the apple suite at the time. As I got a bit older and richer, I signed up for an apple developer account which gave me access to tech support (they were amazingly helpful in the days before you could get similar information off the internet or usenet).
Lets compare that to now, where I can download the SDK for not only my mac but my iPhone completely for free (a colleague of mine would disagree on this point, noting that he wanted to develop for the iPhone but had to buy a mac to do so). Not only do I get an excellent SDK, but I get video tutorials, lots of example code and even a simulator! Sadly, I'm too busy to tinker any more but I do feel that Apple is bending over backwards to make it easy for me, completely unlike how they were twenty years ago.
They could be better - If they embraced open standards a bit more so that say MobileMe could be connected to using LDAP - it would make it easier to do cool stuff in a similar way to how easy it is to do cool stuff in Linux. But to say they're less tinker friendly because they try and prevent jail-breaking is just... wrong.
Every jailbreak relies on finding a way to to crash the phone and insert code. This is a bug in the system, which has to be fixed to protect legions of other users, some of whom do their banking on their iPhone -- and remember, Bruce Schneier warned people not to do their banking on Windows, because it's too easy to "insert code" on a Windows computer. The banking apps on an iPhone are inherently more secure than anything on the web, or anything accessed through IE. A jailbreak so you can put on a cool program that Apple didn't pass can also put trojans there, too. Apple isn't being unduly mean to jailbreakers. If they really want to get good at it, they can figure out what to do next. Leave the debuggers to other platforms.
And that's all that Apple's "doing" to jailbreakers. Lots of people who want to do that are still doing that. No lawsuits that I know of.
It's sad that jailbreaking is now considered normal by so many.
You shouldn't have to hack into a machine that you own just in order to be able to use it. It's not normal. It's not natural.
To have to download a grey-market third party hack just so you can install Java... do you never stop and think "What the fuck am I doing?" or "Do I really have to do this?"
I really cannot get my head around the mindset of the jailbreaker who despises the restrictions imposed by the manufacturer but still votes for those restrictions with his wallet.
If the restrictions are so bad, why don't you just stop fighting the manufacturer, and buy something that doesn't need to be "jailbroken" in order to be useful?
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Most awesome phone ever. Completely open, runs a very normal Linux distro, and you can "apt-get install" stuff on it.
No jailbreaking needed, the terminal is one of the applications in the default installation, and you can install SSH.
The old Apple which you remember so fondly was the Apple of Woz.
The new Apple is the Apple of Jobs.
Woz was a hacker. Jobs is an authoritarian.
All the rest flows from that.
"We're off to hack the Apple! The wonderful Apple of Woz...."
I tire of the “won’t someone think of the children” rhetoric. This article is complaining about “lock-down” on media devices, not on PCs. If I wanted to, it’s even easier to tinker with a Mac today than it was 20 years ago. I’ve got Terminal, AppleScript, Automator, and the Developer Tools. If I want to look at the sort of thing I used to need Resedit for, I just control click an application to show package contents. Sure, I don’t have much access to specific registers of memory, but I don’t really need that to do very exciting things because of the level of horsepower I have at hand on a modern machine. Getting upset over the “closedness” of the iPad or iPod is like getting cranky because you can’t write software for your TV. It’s a device for people who want to passively consume. They don’t even have the most basic input devices of keyboard and mouse. That right there shows you that they’re for consumers, not creators.
A professor (a Mac head unsurprisingly) wanted to teach a class on iPhone application development. Well of course that needs to run on Macs and we don't have any Mac labs since some of our software is Windows only and we need to purchase budget computers. I don't know what he planned to do about that, maybe buy some Macs for teaching out of his research funds. However the bigger problem, the show stopper problem, was Apple. We needed to get the SDK licenses. They sent over this ginormous contract for us to sigh. That of course had to go to the lawyers, who modified it and sent it back. Apple said "No. No modification are permitted, you sign it as it is now or you can't have it." Well, we have no authority to sign, only the lawyers can do that. They weren't going to sign it as is. So, we had to say screw that.
Now the class is being taught on Android app development. This has proved to be dramatically less problematic. The SDK runs fine on our Windows systems. It would also run on Linux or Mac systems, if needed so if we want to put it on our shell systems as well as our lab system we could. Getting the SDK was not problematic either. No contract to sign, I just downloaded it from Google's site and installed it.
Does this all matter? I dunno, all I can say is there's a class of students being taught how to develop for the Android phones, rather than the iPhone precisely because of the locked down environment. The requirement to use Mac hardware, but in particular the requirement to sign a massive contract vastly in Apple's favour killed any chance that it might be taught. We simply cannot do that.
Ironic that this company once ran an ad based on Orwell's 1984 where Apple decries totalitarian control.
When one understands the nature of projection, which is where we attribute to others the behaviors and characteristics we can't see or can't accept about ourselves, one then starts to be able to see expressions like Apple's famous "1984" commercial as the most revealing indicators of the character of and the most reliable predictors of the future behavior of the speaker.
;-)
Projection isn't an occasional occurrence; it's the way the ego functions. It's always operative. Every ego-driven activity - an observation, a statement, an action - one makes is a projection.
It's true in personal relationships (both on the low side and the high side, it's how people fight and how people fall in love) and in group relationships (read any pronouncement from any country about their enemy and one knows exactly what's true about the country making the accusation).
The important tell is the amount of emotional energy in the statement. The amount of emotional energy, the reactivity, associated with an action or observation or statement is a measure of the energy the thing to which the speaker is reacting has within the speaker. So lots of short-term energy (e.g., a quick, visceral emotional response to something) or lots of long-term energy (a thing on which one spends one's time and energy, over and over) both reveal that the thing to which the speaker is reacting is unconscious to them internally - and thus is actually what runs them. The same statement made objectively and dispassionately indicates the speaker has a conscious awareness and acceptance of, and thus control over, that characteristic within them.
And because human consciousness is self-similar, projection works at every scale. It's really quite beautiful.
Some examples:
Corporations: Google's mantra of "Don't Be Evil"
Politics: Bush's demonization of Saddam Hussein as a "brutal dictator" who "hates freedom"
Nations: Israel's fear that Iran wants to "wipe their enemies off the map"
Religions: The characteristics people project onto their chosen deity (e.g., Christ's compassion and love)
Personal: What you're thinking about the writer of this comment right now.
Of course, knowing about projection is not only useful in understanding others, it's essential for learning the truth about and becoming responsible for oneself. (The classic mistake made when first learning about projection is to see it only in other people, and not apply it to oneself: "Ha! That idiot has no idea they're projecting!" Oooooops....)
I'd say the nature of projection is one of the most helpful things I've ever learned, easily the equal of any of my technical education.
The sadly amusing thing about the "1984" commercial is how much the setting resembles a Steve Jobs presentation.
"On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984'.
Give us until 2009."
But can they use that cheap, full version for commercial purposes? Methinks not: "This software is the complete and professional grade versions of the tools, but you must use them in pursuit of increasing your education, skills, and knowledge in either science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or design.".
And the Express edition does not support Windows Mobile development according to Microsoft.
How come nobody realizes that ChromeOS isn't any different?
For the sake of security, I highly doubt that resources editors and hex editors (in order to patch executable files) would run on ChromeOS.
It's a tradeoff worth making.
Joe Hewitt's post about the iPad is worth a read: http://joehewitt.com/post/ipad/
{{.sig}}
Dtrace? Terminal? The reality is that you can do SO MUCH MORE tinkering in OSX than you ever could. Ever used OS9? Black box magic. OSX, by comparison, is like a playground....
Flash kills the battery life on my laptop. You can always tell when a simple flash animation is loaded because the browser's CPU usage goes up to 90% and the fans spin up to their highest speed. Browser crashes are far more likely on pages with flash. Safari even has its own special error message for when flash crashes it.
Apple already has a platform with the hardware necessary to run flash. It's a laptop. It costs twice as much as an iPad.
If Adobe wants Flash to run on the iPad, perhaps they should look into making it run efficiently in operating systems that aren't Windows.
Anon coward due to flame war...
Come on man, do you do nothing but read what others parrot? You bring up a flip the coin and flashlight apps like that is all there are. You must have missed all the medical apps (yep, 10 buck app that will help you learn about arrhythmias). You must have missed streaming music apps, guitar tuning, music theory, complex graphing calculators, sophisticated audio sequencers. For frak sake there's even an enigma machine simulator I found in someone's sig
I have no problem with things running on the iPhone in a sandbox as it accesses the public cellular networks. Anyone caught breaking the cellular network by installing unstable software on a jailbroken deserves to have their ass kicked to the point that they are in a hospital eating through a straw for several months. Jailbreak your non-cellular Wifi devices all you want but when you jailbreak a cellphone, you are putting lives at risk.
Devices like the iPhone and iPad are supposed to be networked appliances, not general purpose computers.
PS. Here are a few links for you since you seem to be clueless as to how to use google.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
All I did was type in the following keywords into google: " Apple Open Source". I know, that is so non-obvious *sarcasm*.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Doesn't have to be, it can [...]
Similarly for thermostats---firmware upgrades are hard on all thermostats, not just the $VENDOR ones.
Doesn't have to be
I trust you on that.
The point was that the problems* on Samsung TVs are TV-specific, while the problems on iPods are Apple-specific, not smartphone-specific.
(* limited to the problems named in your parent^n post; your own, and the iPod-not-particularly-loving one)
By making them unchangable the price of the overall device is lowered and the form factor can be made smaller, its a trade off, and its a trade off that consumers wanted.
Are you arguing that consumers wanted unchangeable batteries in their iPods? If so, what's your evidence? That it sold well? How do you know it wasn't because of the disk space? The Apple brand? The user interface (excluding the battery)? The battery lifetime? The rapidity and ease with which you could transfer music from your computer to your portable music player ("PMP")?
I've only just found this out this evening, so the scope of this is still unclear (and hence I am open to been corrected), but it appears that the S60 2nd edition may have had the self sign capability and it may have actually been pulled by Nokia from the S60 3rd edition.
I have a unusual vision problem which the NHS has failed to diagnose. Can you help? More at failedbythenhs.blogspot.com
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/university.html
It's certainly possible that your .edu's lawyers are bigger asshats that most lawyers, but I can't imagine that this EULA is any worse than the one your .edu signed with Microsoft for Windows, or for the other proprietary Windows-only software that you said you use.
Sadly, by denying the common people access to the inner system, Apple is becoming exactly like that "religion" we all love to hate...
One only has to look at Apples position in particular market to understand the contrasts in their developer policies. Apple's PC market penetration is very low. Apple cannot break 5% market share even after the Vista debacle. As a result, Apple ships the Developers tools free with every Mac, aids Windows installation with Bootcamp, and even takes an open source approach to the core of OS X. In contrast, Apple dominates the iPod market and is a strong contender in the iPhone market. Apples developer policy reflects that position. Apple forces developers through the iTunes and only Cocoa SDK . I also seriously doubt Apple is making any effort to put Android on the phone. This position is less developer friendly than the Mac. The powers that be at Apple must feel thar the developers need Apple more than Apple needs them. I believe this will hurt them in the long run. This policy is extremely short sighted given the rise of Android (think Windows in the 80's). iPhone OS may be better than Android now but Google is very flexible with their developers policy. Google will allow them to take Android devices a lot further than Apple will their developers go. Apple will lose out again just as they did with Windows.
Case in point, I am absolutely in love with the iPhone. I would have one right now and would would pay the full price except for one thing. I have to purchase AT&T data plan for $30/month for as long as I have the phone. I have no need for a data plan. I am around wifi most of the time and I would rarely need to use AT&T 3G. If I were so incline to use 3g, I would probably download a tv show off of hulu with Flash. AT&T network can't handle that and Apple won't let me have flash. Moreover, even if they did, it would run very slowly because Apple is not friendly with it developers. I believe Apple is pushing me to buy content from them and pay for a service I will never use. The forced data plan is the same with Android but at least Flash for Android is around the corner. In the race to my pocket, Google may edge out Apple. That is a shame, I do love my Macintosh and would have loved the iPhone. This is bigger than tinkering and I hope Steve Jobs wakes up.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
.
Oh, give me a break. Tinkerers always find new things to tinker with. I used to tinker with vacuum tube electronics, radios and TVs, before personal computers were even around. Do I blame Sony for preventing me from tinkering nowadays? Absolutely not.
It is the natural progression of humanity to turn new 'tinkerable' technology into 'non-tinkerable' commodities.
So stop trying to hold back the progression of humankind, stop whining, and encourage your kids find something new to tinker with.
And stop blaming Apple for your lack of insight.
As someone who read the legendary Inside Macintosh (1983 draft; I still have it) cover to cover before even touching a Mac (some time around 1985), I don't understand this contention that the original Mac was "closed" to developers. The *case* was not easy to open, but the programmer model was not locked up in any real way. Almost from the beginning, Apple offered assembler- and compiler-level toolsets. Initially these were Lisa-hosted, simply because the Mac porting hadn't been done yet. I personally used Macintosh Development System (1984) and Whitesmiths C in the very beginning, before reverting to Pascal for a while, using powerful toolchains such as TML and Lightspeed Pascal. Consulair C was available in 1985.
From the first moment, third party developer tools sprang up like kudzu around the original Mac, most of them cutting edge in some way. Many innovative development technologies were pioneered on the Mac: interpreted Pascal with a sophisticated GUI (Mac Pascal), Object Pascal and MVC systems (MacApp), Neon, 4GLs, incremental compilers (Lightspeed/THINK/Symantec C), etc. Does anyone even remember that in the 80s, Apple pushed out several full releases of their own Mac Smalltalk-80 system, which Squeak is now based on? (Harvey Alcabes, I remember you.)
And few now remember that the Lisa itself, despite appearances better described as a "minicomputer" than micro, ran about six different operating systems, including UCSD P-system and XENIX, and had several full-fledged language systems from Object Pascal through COBOL and Fortran.
you had me at #!
Ever wonder why there's no camera in the iPad? It wasn't ready yet. That's right, it's a mobile Telescreen.
You misappropriate the term "defective by design".
"Does not contain the features I desire" is not "defective by design".
Why don't they allow us to run multiple applications at once on the iphone and ipad, for example?
On the iPhone, due to hardware restrictions mostly. I know a little about that, I happen to be an iPhone developer. While the device is able to multi-task (and does it to a degree), I am very, very happy that it doesn't allow apps to do that. Because if it did, people would have a random number of background tasks, and on that device you simply don't have the spare ressources to ignore that. Besides, the small screen makes actual simultaneous applications impractical anyways.
If you don't know that restrictions are as much part of design as features, you need to read up on design. There's a great speech about simplicity and the tyranny of choice over on TED, I can recommend it.
Because it ruins the user experience for the average user, and this could give apple a bad rep. As a consumer i do not want to be treated like that.
Ah, you want your experience to be ruined? Not a problem, buy Microsoft, they have a guarantee on that part. :-)
Computing devices should be open, and there should be rules for that.
Why?
I'm serious. Give me a good reason apart from "because I want it".
And when you do so, please do consider that these days, practically everything aside from food and clothes has microchips inside, and could be considered a "computing device".
In fact, if microsoft pulled apple's anti-competitive tricks, then they would be sanctioned by the EU before they saw it coming.
You may not like it and I do in fact sympathize (not being able to install arbitrary software except through the App Store is one of the reasons I'll very likely not be getting an iPad) - but whatever you want to call it in your anger, I fail to see where it has anything to do with anti-competitiveness.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org